


the monsters we become

by sinisterkid92



Category: Timeless (TV 2016)
Genre: A little bit of angst, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, that conversation that Lucy really needs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-18
Updated: 2018-03-18
Packaged: 2019-04-03 22:12:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,723
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14005932
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sinisterkid92/pseuds/sinisterkid92
Summary: Lucy is reeling weeks later still after the events of the pilot, trying to come to terms with what has happened... Flynn comforts her.





	the monsters we become

**Author's Note:**

> Hiya! We're back!! 
> 
> This is just a 'lil something I cooked together that I hope you enjoy. I think Lucy would do really good with a heart to heart with Flynn because who better understands than someone who's been in the same/very similar shoes??
> 
> Who else is sooooo excited for the ride we're about to go on this season?

In the six weeks since they last saw each other it seemed impossible how much they had changed. He, somehow angrier yet more contained than ever before. His hair dark and unruly like it never was before. She, quieter and contained but in a way that was more lethal than before. He sensed it, curiosity piqued at the darkness that crowded around her that hadn’t been there when he’d last seen her -- though he’d tried to forget her laugh haunted him. Grabbed onto him like a vice grip whenever he thought about her, about Rittenhouse, about her and Rittenhouse and that they’d kidnapped her. 

A part of him, a big part that lifted from his shoulders when she walked into the tiny cell that now was his home, was relieved when he saw her. Too many scenarios, too familiar with Rittenhouse and their ideology and methods, had ravaged through his head for weeks now. Ever since Agent Christopher had let it slip, not unintentionally it was a calculated move, that Lucy had been kidnapped by her own mother. 

Six weeks, almost seven, when she walked into that cell with her shoulders up by her ears and refusing to speak or look at him. Sadness, he identified it in how small she made herself. Kept herself contained, as if any burst of movement or expression would break the fragile damn she’d built up to keep herself moving forward. In this job there was no room to lie down in bed for weeks to despair. All that was allowed was forward movement. 

It took another week, one how negotiating and anger spilling over like venom. Only Flynn understood that anger, its toxicity that putrefied all good things that attempted to grow. Whenever she tried to connect with Wyatt, Rufus, and Jiya a wall went up. She couldn’t reach out and find what it was that once connected her to them. One moment she felt fine, when she was in the past it was easier to put everything in a box and focus on the mission. It was the present that was unrecognizable, a present that she had no place in. 

Flynn arrived with little pomp and circumstance. One moment he was there and shacking up with them, like that was the way it was always supposed to be.

When there were no trips Lucy tried, she really did try, to find that connection that had been burgeoning with Wyatt before it all went to hell. She saw it in him. He cared for her in a way that she knew she should want to be cared for in. He was nice to look at, and he wanted her. She really tried with him, tried to find the reciprocal feelings that weren’t just about finding comfort and something familiar. She’d done that mistake with Noah, fallen into bed with him when it felt like the whole world was reeling and she missed a connection with someone. What she wanted was the familiar, the safe place that she had with her sister -- but she couldn’t find that in Noah or Wyatt, no matter how hard she tried.

In Hollywood they kissed. She just wanted to live, to feel it all and with adrenaline pumping through her veins she had thought for a second that she’d found what she’d been looking for. But when they returned and things went back to what was the new normal it wasn’t there anymore. 

She hated herself for it. Felt defunct and more so broken than before -- ever since her mother had taken her, kicking and screaming until her voice was hoarse and someone knocked her out with a syringe stabbed in her arm, she’d been fumbling to find the thread to herself again. Who was she now? What was she becoming?

The nightmare woke her up again two nights after returning from Hollywood and the chilling distance between herself and Wyatt had solidified by the possible return of Jessica. She knew that Wyatt was planning his escape, that he would be gone within days to find the wife that might not be dead anymore. That safe place, that someone who wanted her despite all the brokenness was disappearing. Because even if she didn’t want him back in the same way he wanted her -- she’d caught him looking at her that way more than once, that way that held too much meaning for her to be able to grasp -- it was nice to be wanted. Especially when she was who she was. 

The dream was a familiar one at this point. It was a nightly visitor ever since she came back to the bunker. No matter what she couldn’t shake the memory of taking a man’s life. She didn’t even know his name, didn’t know what impact he had on history. Was he going to die just some weeks later, or was he going to live a long and happy life that she’d robbed him of? Was he supposed to have children, were there people out there who hadn’t been born because of her, and others who existed because she killed this one man.

In the end, it didn’t matter whether he was meant to die in that war or not, if he would’ve died that very second just somewhere else by someone else -- she had taken a life. An innocent person’s life for the mission. She would do it again, and again, and again. Preserving history and the present no longer felt like the most important task. Not when the present came with her family. 

She was ready to die to end it, or at the very least put a wrench in their plan and make sure they couldn’t go anywhere in the past for years. Not until they found someone who could build another time machine, which probably required inventing time travel all over again considering all of the data and research had been blown up in the explosion. They had Emma, they thought that was all they needed. Their queen in their chess piece, able to pull off all the moves and do whatever she needed to do to kill the king and make her own ruler conquer. Without Emma they had no one, at least not yet. Not then. Now? She didn’t know. 

A year ago her world was steady. All that she was worried about was tenure. She craved stable ground underneath her feet, the predictability of knowing she would be able to work for the same institution for the rest of her life. That was what she wanted. Then Garcia Flynn lost his family and finally went after Rittenhouse. 

Unable to go back to sleep, not even trying because she’d been through this before, she looked over at her bunkmate. Jiya was sound asleep still. The poor girl had been dealt the worst deal of them all through the battle against Rittenhouse. Though Jiya showed a strong front Lucy had been witness to too many seizures to buy the facade. She was like all of them, just trying to keep afloat by ignoring the issue and just going through it. One struggle, one trip, one seizure at a time. 

She sat up instead, reaching for the slippers with her toes and pulled them toward her. Her head was still groggy with sleep, the dream lingering in her like a shiver she couldn’t shake. It had settled in her gut and all hopes of any more sleep were gone. 

The hallways of the bunker were lit an eerie green, it looked different in the middle of the night, a chill lingered in the air in that way it only did at night when there was no one up. On the wall by the kitchen the clock ticked close to three thirty, meaning that it would be another three hours before most of them were up. Both Jiya and Rufus tended to sleep longer at times, sometimes not emerging until ten in the morning. They were usually the last to head to bed, savoring the few moments they had just to themselves to be the couple they were. Jiya spent most nights in Rufus’ room but the newness and intensity of what they were all going through she sometimes took a break to sleep it out in her and Lucy’s room. Those nights she would usually not wake up until much closer to noon. 

Wanting to ensure that she wouldn’t be interrupted by anyone else having a restless night’s sleep, or up to use the bathroom, she padded past the kitchen and turned left into the room that overlooked the ship-bay. It wasn’t much unlike the one at Mason’s industries, just smaller and smelled the way old people’s houses tended to. Like this place was a sentient living thing that had aged with the rest of the world. 

This was where she would usually end up, in one of the almost uncomfortable armchairs dragged up to the plastic window that made everything on the other side look distorted and almost dreamlike. In the middle of the night, or any time of the day, this wasn’t a place the others went. There was nothing here, no use for this space. Once upon a time when someone designed this shelter in preparation for nuclear war she supposed they’d imagined this to be a command station. Now it was a museum of old and probably moldy furniture.

As she opened the door she didn’t see him at first, didn’t expect to see anyone so she didn’t register his presence. Someone as large as him should have been impossible to miss, but that dream – the young boy looking at her with only half a face asking her to spare him, and she didn’t have the courage in her to tell him that he was already dead. She’d hear the shot ring out, again and again. Feel the phantom pain of the kickback on her shoulder. She imagined clawing Emma’s eyes out instead of killing the boy, but nothing reversed time. 

“Oh,” she gasped when she saw him. He was sitting in the chair she had claimed as her own some weeks ago before he arrived. Unlike her he couldn’t curl up in it, tuck his feet underneath himself and make himself as small as possible. The chair looked undersized in comparison as he sat in it, sank down and nothing like the put together smart monster she used to seen him as. 

“Can’t sleep?” his voice was rough like gravel, barely awake and deeper than it usually was. He looked over his shoulder, his index finger casually resting on his bottom chin as if he’d been lost in thought as much as she had been. His eyes were dazed, tattling of sleepless nights and a mind that was running around untamed. Much like hers. 

“Nightmare,” she said, her hand was still grasping the door handle, debating whether to leave him and find some other space to hide out instead, maybe a tool shed or something. Before she could decide he pointed at one of the other chairs in the room. She breathed a sigh in relief. 

“Occupational hazard,” was his only reply as his eyes looked into the middle distance as his finger dragged on his bottom lip, worrying it back and forth in a subconscious movement. 

She sunk into the chair, resting her chin on her knees as she looked out into the ship-bay. They were quiet for a while, the lingering sleep draining them of words but nightmares keeping them up, but then she looked over to him, breaking the silence. “Do you get them, too?” He didn’t answer, but paused to look at her feet not yet daring to look straight at her. “About the people you’ve killed?”

“Most of them,” he answered surprisingly quick, she hadn’t expected him to answer at all. “It’s the ones that I forget that are the most difficult to deal with, though.” He sat up straighter in the chair. “I can deal with remembering them, that’s what I deserve, forgetting?” He shook his head. 

There had been so many of them, those who got in the way, or those who had something he needed, and then the people who he was there to kill. He couldn’t count them anymore, didn’t know the names of most of them. Yet their faces, there were so many faces that haunted him, and then there were the faceless. The lives he snuffed out but couldn’t recall why or how exactly, just that he was the one responsible for ending their lives. 

“Did anyone tell you about what happened when my… when I was with Rittenhouse?” she swallowed against the mention of her mom. They all seemed to know everything about her without her saying anything, ready to spill her secrets like it was public property. She was, after all, the common denominator between all enemies they’ve pursued, but she no longer felt like she was for herself anymore. She no longer knew what part of her had been exposed and what part was left to be her own. 

He shook his head. “I thought they were all dead, gone.” Her hands trembled at the memory of thinking she’d lost them all, her allies and friends. “It was just on me, you know… to end it all. And I was willing to do anything to finish them off. So, so I killed a person. An innocent boy that was maybe barely twenty years old. He wasn’t Rittenhouse, wasn’t anything but a necessary move to make to ensure that I could end it all.” She closed her eyes and could see the scene play out again, the recoil of the gun and the blood and smell of gunpowder. She opened her eyes. “I had a grenade, I was planning to blow the mothership up before we could jump, but Emma found the grenade.” 

“You were going to die with them,” he finished for her. The silence hummed between them as she didn’t reply for a while, reliving the moment when she realized that Emma had the grenade. That was still her first plan, though she hoped that Wyatt and Rufus would have stopped it first, but ultimately it was on her to see it through. 

“I hadn’t planned on living with it,” she said, eventually. Her voice was thick. It felt wrong to grieve the loss of a man whose life she had taken, yet she did. Every day she mourned him as she also mourned the person she used to be before she killed him. Jesse James was difficult but it had a meaning, she knew it was supposed to be that way. If Jesse James didn’t die who knew how many people would die because of that? If she hadn’t killed him it would have jeopardized the chance of getting her sister back. Now, her sister was gone for good. This death didn’t have a purpose she could assign it. It was wasted when she lived. 

She felt his hands on hers, she hadn’t noticed him walking over to her. He squeezed them as he looked into her eyes with a tight yet comforting smile. 

“I get it,” he pulled at her hand gently, and she untangled her feet, placing them on the ground beside his feet. “We have become monsters so they don’t have to. It’s not going to get easier, but we’re going to have to keep on doing it. Because we know just how dark and twisted they are, we know what is at stake and… if we don’t sacrifice our souls, then who will?”

There was none of the excuses, none of the ‘you did what you had to’ because those excuses were for people who truly had no other choice. She made one, she chose the mission over a life, and she would do it again. In that moment she had understood Flynn, why he did what he did, why he became who he was, and why he could never return to his family even if he did manage to save them. 

She wrapped her arms around him, pulling him tight against her and burrowing her face in his neck. His reaction was instantaneous, arms pulling her her flush against him so that she could feel his heart beating against her chest.


End file.
